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Not only was his "epiphany" interesting, but his site in general has lots of good info for artists, cartographers, and designers. It's a real resource. Thanks for including it.

I'm currently working on a city map for my next BIG project. The way I am going about it is to start from the beginning--literally, the "historical" beginning of the city. I plan to watch it grow organically as I add buildings in the order that I think would make sense. The city is slowly expanding as buildings are built down streets. Then, the construction of a wall will force crowding as space is limited inside. Then, of course, the wall will no longer be able to hold all the inhabitants and building will continue.

Additionally, I started with terrain contours before drawing a single building. I think that the growth of ancient cities was very much influenced by the contours of the land. I'll have them dictate where streets go, where the breaks are between buildings, etc.

I'm very excited about the prospects, and I will, at some point, post some of them to the site.

You hit the nail on the head there. Since most patterns in nature are fractal, there will be self similarity at all levels. That is why you CAN take the outline of a patch of mould and make it a continent. This old post talked about using real world maps as a starting point for fantasy maps, and talked about changing scale (i.e. use a small cluster of islands in the real world as continents in the fantasy world) and other techniques to obfuscate the source.

The same reasoning lets us use cracks in paint as roads and macro photos of broccoli as forest textures